A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.
— Manfred Eigen
Why am I focusing on fracking?
I will not be pursuing a career in the oil and gas industry. So then, why earn my PhD through research on data from a hydraulic fracturing project?
It is difficult. That is the advantage.
The data from a real, complex hydraulic fracturing project are noisy, error-prone, and quite large. It requires domain specific knowledge to understand where to focus my efforts, but it also enables me to apply data science methodologies directly to a challenging data set. The skills I have learned along the way are transferrable to many other fields and industries. Sensors are everywhere and they’re all connected. Most of the time. As such, the ability to familiarize, clean, and model messy data is the end result of a long academic journey.
What is Hydraulic Fracturing?
Hydraulic fracturing is the process of injecting fluid at pressure that exceeds the minimal principal stress of a formation to create cracks or fractures. It has been successfully used to increase permeability of unconventional reservoirs and to stimulate production of a well, and it is one of the key technologies in shale gas revolution (King, 2012).
In conventional reservoirs there is a lot of work required to identify and locate an area that is oil-rich. The requirements for this to be the case are similar to that of earning a PhD - it requires a lot of time and pressure, but it’s worth it in the end.
Time. This is the biggest difference between conventional and unconventional reservoirs, and one of the biggest advantages of hydraulic fracturing. Traditional reservoirs consist of biological materials that have been acted up by high pressure for thousands of years. After some large amount of time, and with the right conditions (heat, depth, pressure, time, etc.), the biological material changed into carbon-rich material that can be retrieved by traditional means.
Hydraulic fracturing enables the retrieval of carbon-rich material that would otherwise not be ready for some time. The mechanism of retrieval is important to understand.
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